Within the Sanctuary of Wings

by Marie Brennan

  We did not light a signal fire. The next morning, at the very crack of dawn, we heard the buzzing of engines and saw the remaining caeligers lift into the air. Their pale undersides worked as intended, making them difficult to track across the sky, but I followed their course northeast until they came parallel to a gap in the peaks, whereupon they tacked hard to the west and out of sight. They had vanished into the empty heart of the mountains, and were gone.

  That quickly, we were alone in the Mrtyahaima.

  SIX

  Ponies—Overland to Hlamtse Rong—Night-time disturbance—Hlamtse Rong—Butter tea—Husbands—The monsoon

  As soon as the caeligers were gone, Thu laid out a sheet of paper on which he had sketched his best guess at our location and the surrounding terrain. He said, “We are here.” His finger tapped one spot along the ramparts at the western edge of Tser-nga. “The village of Hlamtse Rong is here.” He tapped another, northward of us.

  In between lay a forbidding stripe, roughly where I had seen the caeligers turn west the night before. “What is that?” I asked.

  “A river gorge,” Thu said. “I think it may be a tributary of the Lerg-pa.”

  Which we could not fly across. Before I could select from among the curses that rose to my lips, Suhail asked, “And the scale of this map?”

  “If we could go directly there, two days? But we must go east, then north, then west again. If we are lucky … five days, perhaps. If we are not lucky…” Thu shrugged.

  There was no use railing against the contrary winds that had kept us from landing closer to our destination. With the caeligers all gone or destroyed, we could only tackle the challenge thus presented, or give up—and none of us, of course, were willing to give up.

  Unfortunately, there was simply no way we could carry all of our equipment the necessary distance. We would have needed the relative strength of ants to each toil along beneath a fifth of the pile, and that was without accounting for the harsh terrain. “We’ll have to leave some of it here,” Tom said reluctantly, “and send people back for it once we’re established in Hlamtse Rong.”

  Chendley looked grim. “Even if we leave all of your scientific equipment, it’s still too much. We’ll need rations, shelter, clothing, equipment for crossing the river. Either we take twice the time making a supply depot at the edge of the gorge, or…”

  “Or we need help,” I said, finishing the thought he was too reluctant to voice.

  Help might be available—but we would have to ask for it. And of the five of us, only Thu spoke Tser-zhag to any real extent (though Suhail had been practicing assiduously, and was making good progress). He would also attract less attention, I suspected; after all, the Yelangese had been through here before, and his features and coloration were not so wildly different from the local norm that he could be identified as foreign at a distance. Tom, on the other hand, would stand out like a daisy in grass, and the rest of us would not fare much better.

  Chendley objected with great force when we proposed to send Thu to find the nearest village by himself. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Handing him a pile of barter and letting him go off on his own—”

  “Why, Lieutenant,” I said with insincere mildness. “Whatever do you imagine will happen? Your concern for his safety is touching, but I think it unlikely that he will fall victim to a footpad out here, in the middle of nowhere.”

  His concern, of course, was for something quite other than Thu’s safety. Although ostensibly the lieutenant had been assigned to us as an aid in mountaineering, we all knew perfectly well that he was also there to be Thu’s watchdog—for, our newfound alliance with the Khiam rebels notwithstanding, the army was composed of suspicious types who did not trust anyone with a Yelangese name. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Chendley, his military associations did not give him any sort of command authority over the expedition, and so Thu went to the village alone.

  He returned before sunset on the second day with two ponies. Chendley, scowling like a thunderhead, declared them utterly inadequate to our needs, but no amount of complaining would improve our options: those two were all the village could spare, whatever enticements Thu offered in return. (Indeed, we were lucky to have two.) I think Chendley had visions of all five of us riding, with a string of pack ponies to carry everything for us, such as recreational mountaineers often enjoy. Perhaps it is just as well that we could not. I have seen people riding Mrtyahaiman ponies, perched on saddles and piles of blankets so high there can be no possibility of communicating with one’s mount by means of legs or seat. I might as soon have tried to communicate with the mountain through a meter of snow. The rider can only perch and offer prayers to whatever deity they honour that the pony will do as intended. Lacking enough to use as mounts, we loaded those two as high as we could with food and other necessities, thanked our lucky stars that Tser-zhag ponies are as hardy as mules, and carried what we could of the remainder upon our backs. Then, groaning beneath our loads, we began walking toward Hlamtse Rong.

  The verb “walk” is wholly inadequate to what followed. No single word will suffice: we walked, crept, climbed, slid, dragged, laboured, and occasionally fell our way across the intervening terrain. And all this effort was made worse by the awareness that, if we descended just a little way, we would find ourselves on much more hospitable ground, below the worst of the ridges which made a washboard of the area we traversed. But the farther down we went, the more attention we would attract. None of us had any illusions that our presence had not been noticed, of course; Thu had gone into the village, and we had undoubtedly been spotted a dozen times by distant herdsmen and traders. Habitation here might be sparse, but that did not mean it was absent. But the more inconspicuous we remained, the easier it was for the Tser-zhag to shrug and let us pass.

  Before we ever embarked upon this journey, Tom, Suhail, and I had discussed what to do if our most experienced climbers, Chendley and Thu, disagreed on routes or techniques. Ultimately we chose to trust in Thu’s experience of that region, even if it meant frustrating our lieutenant. Which it most certainly did—but in one respect that journey to the village of Hlamtse Rong was beneficial to us all, for it gave Thu ample time to prove his competence in the face of Chendley’s distrust. When we roped ourselves together, we did so in two groups: myself following Chendley, and Tom and Suhail behind Thu, because Chendley considered it his sacred duty to keep me alive, and would not let me dangle from a rope tethered to our Yelangese companion. But by the time we reached Hlamtse Rong, he had seen enough of Thu’s skill and courage to accord the man his grudging respect. After all, it is difficult to question someone’s integrity when you have seen him fling his full weight upon his alpenstock to arrest the headlong plunge of his companions into the river below, then hold them both while another man unropes from a horrified baroness and joins him to set up a rescuing belay.

  (When Suhail and Tom were upon solid ground once more, I discarded our usual public reserve and clung quite tightly to my husband for some time. “Please tell me,” I said, my nerves expressing themselves via unsteady humour, “that you did not engineer that incident merely to prove to Chendley that Thu is a good sort.” Suhail’s answering laugh was so shaky as to barely qualify, but it became a joke afterward among the five of us, that any setback or difficulty was a cunning ploy to create trust.)

  I fretted at the slowness of our pace. How could I not? Every day we spent trying to reach Hlamtse Rong brought us one day closer to the onset of the monsoon. We moved at a crawl, for we could not carry every piece of our gear on our backs, and had to spend half our time raising it or lowering it over the same obstacles our bodies had to surmount—and raising and lowering our ponies, too. We were exhausted, gasping for breath, our hearts pounding at the smallest exertion. Our journey up to Parshe in the highlands had given us some time to acclimate to the increasing altitude, but from there to here we had leapt over a rise of more than a thousand meters, and every one of us felt the difference in our bones. Suh
ail suffered particularly, his hands and feet swelling, fatigue and dizziness threatening his balance as he moved. I fretted at not being roped to him, even though I knew he was safer with Tom and Thu, and examined him for fever or fluid in the lungs every time we paused to rest. It was a great relief when, after a few days, his symptoms began to subside.

  But if I claimed I had no energy with which to conduct research during that time, you would know I had been replaced by an imposter.

  I mentioned before the cat-like dragons supposedly kept as pets by the local people. One night, as I climbed out of the tent I shared with Suhail to deal with a certain necessity, I startled several creatures who were investigating our food stores. They froze—I took a step toward them—and they shot skyward in a burst of wings.

  “Dragons!” I exclaimed, instantly awake with delight. I fear my voice was too loud; it disturbed Suhail, who (having not heard me properly) thought I was in some kind of distress, and his half-awake attempt to leap out of the tent ended badly enough that it roused Tom and Chendley both. With the two of them up and moving, of course, Thu could not long stay asleep.

  “Oh,” Thu said when he heard my tale. He did not sound impressed. “Yes. We should be more careful in storing our food, or they will eat it all. They adore fat.”

  At that altitude, it was not surprising. We had packed a large amount of pemmican (a mixture of powdered meat, fat, and berries), knowing that the cold and thin air would cause us to crave the fattiest, most filling food we could put down our gullets. I was fascinated to see it act as bait for dragons, though. “Are these the beasts you told us about? The mews?”

  “Mew,” of course, is not any kind of official name. The locals have a variety of terms for them: drukshi, udrakor (“noisy trickster”), and others less polite. But Thu and his companions had dubbed them the Yelangese equivalent of “mews,” because of their call, which resembled that of a cat.

  The Tser-zhag did not, as travellers’ rumours had it, keep them as pets. Quite the contrary, in fact, as mews are scavengers who will paw through garbage, steal shiny objects, and even (in large enough groups) dive at yaks. The locals say this is an attempt to burrow through their dense wool and chew at the fat beneath, but I never saw one succeed; I think a yak would have to be very far gone indeed to let that pass without retort. But their failures notwithstanding, they are far from popular with the human inhabitants of the region. Suhail and Chendley soon came to detest them as passionately as Thu did, after they perpetually broke into our stores and played havoc with our gear.

  But for Tom and myself, they were very nearly as interesting as the frozen specimen we hoped to find. They could not be counted as true dragons, for they had nothing resembling extraordinary breath, but we relished the chance to dispel a misconception among our peers—not to mention answer new questions. I was especially eager to know how the mews avoided losing too much heat through the thin membrane of their wings.

  Our curiosity was not sufficient to make us delay our forward progress, of course. A bird in the hand might be worth two in the bush, but a dragon in the ice was worth half a dozen of its diminutive cousins digging through our supplies. The latter would still be there next year; the former might not be. Nonetheless, we made what observations we could as we trudged to Hlamtse Rong, leaving out bait at night, studying their tracks, and keeping watch for them during our hikes.

  Of the mews I will say more later—but first, the village.

  * * *

  Hlamtse Rong is named for the valley it sits in, which points toward the nearby peak of Hlamtse as if laid out by a landscape architect. In those days it was a flyspeck too small to even appear on Tser-zhag maps, let alone those made by foreigners, and it is not much larger now. Were it not for Thu, we should never have found the place, nor had any reason to go looking for it to begin with. Its population numbered less than one hundred, eking out their living through a combination of yak-herding and growing crops on what narrow terraces they could carve out of the slopes. The only reason anyone had built a house there at all was because it was unclaimed land: the people of the village belong to the tiny Nying minority, whose members had been evicted from more favourable regions by the dominant Tser-zhag.

  Living where they do, on the extreme edge of a country in which they do not enjoy power, the people of Hlamtse Rong take a very cautious approach to strangers. When we entered the village, we might have thought the entire place deserted: there was no one at all in the narrow dirt track that served as a main street, no one in front of the houses or visible through windows. But here and there we saw eyes peering over a low wall, or caught the movement as a shutter swung hastily closed, and we knew we were being watched.

  This, as much as the mountaineering, was why we had brought Thu. He called out in Tser-zhag, which is not the native tongue of the Nying, but they speak it quite well. Under his breath, Chendley muttered, “How do we know what he’s saying is friendly?”—but his heart was not in the suspicion; he said it more out of habit.

  I could not deny that we were as much in Thu’s hands right now as Tom and Suhail had been when they went over that cliff above the river. Whatever he said caused a man to emerge from one of the houses: a small fellow, with the broad face typical of his people. This man peered at Thu, who spoke to him in what even I could recognize as very halting sentences. I alternated between watching the two of them and watching Suhail, who had the abstracted look that meant he was bending all his concentration to the task of parsing their conversation. I envied him his facility with such things.

  Finally the local man nodded, and Thu sighed in relief. “He remembers me,” he said to us. “And no one has given them difficulty because we were here before.”

  Apart from the weather and the mountains themselves, this was the biggest danger we faced. The Nying of Hlamtse Rong were so separated from their Tser-zhag countrymen in the “lowlands” (by which they meant those living a mere three thousand meters above sea level) that they hardly cared that the government in Thokha had closed the borders. But they might have gossiped about the Yelangese explorers to someone in another village, and so on down the chain until it reached the ears of some official who did care. If such a man had taken action against this village, our welcome might have been even colder than the environment itself.

  With that hurdle cleared, we laid out our gifts, like foreign diplomats at the feet of a very ragged potentate. We had brought things useful to the Nying: copper pots, good steel knives, waterproofed silk. The sight of these items lured the other villagers out of their wary hiding, and soon we had everyone from old grannies to toddlers barely old enough to walk poking at our gifts—and at the five of us, too. Thu they had seen before, and his features and coloration were not too dissimilar to their own, but Suhail’s Akhian nose and cheekbones drew comment, and my pale skin and lighter hair even more. But they were the most fascinated by Tom, who was, as usual for him, already red and peeling from the sun, which is even more intense at high elevations than it is in the desert or at sea.

  In exchange for these things (and the entertainment we brought), we were given leave to use the village as our base of operations while we attempted to search for another frozen specimen. “Have you asked them whether they’ve seen any other carcasses themselves?” I asked Thu, as we lugged our equipment to the house where we would be staying.

  He shook his head. “Do not say anything of it to them yet.”

  “I hardly could,” I said wryly, dropping my pack inside the courtyard wall. “Remember, I have not mastered above a dozen words of their tongue.”

  Thu apologized for his error, then went on. “They consider Gyaptse, the nearby mountain, very ill-omened—its name means it is cursed. They did not like us going up there the first time, but it is the lowest col in the vicinity—the only one we had any hope of using as a pass.”

  I thought of the Draconean site outside Drustanev, and the island of Rahuahane. “You did not see any ruins near there, did you?”

&nbs
p; His answering look suggested I was mad. With justification, I suppose; no one builds structures of that kind at such an altitude. Even the monasteries of Tser-nga are never above five thousand meters. Once I explained my reason for asking, he said, “No. It is cursed only because those who wander too much around the area have died.”

  And yet we proposed to go there ourselves. Well, it was not the first reckless thing I had done.

  The houses in the village were all of a type common to the high regions: round and multi-storied, with livestock on the ground floor and the family above, and the attic space used for storage (which helps to insulate the people below). Shuwa, the woman to whom the house belonged, had been in the street for our arrival, and had raced ahead to make all ready for us—which, given that there was no guest room to prepare, largely consisted of brewing tea. When we climbed up the steep ladder into the living quarters, a tray was already set out, with five steaming cups on it.

  It is natural that when we read a word like “tea,” our minds supply the most obvious interpretation, as shaped by our own experiences. For a Scirling, this means black tea, sweetened with sugar and milk. For a Yelangese, it might be green tea. But we were in Tser-nga, and that meant those five cups contained butter tea.

  I understand why the people of the region drink such a thing. When your body is desperate to stay warm and fed in an environment that wishes you to be neither, butter is an excellent way to sustain yourself. Naturally, then, it appears in any food where it might profitably be added, and on this front I have no complaint. But I feel that adding it to beverages is a bridge too far; however much I reminded myself of its beneficial qualities (and however much my body, on occasion, craved the sustenance), I never reconciled myself to drinking the stuff.

  My travels, however, have inured me to consuming many things I would not even consider at home, and despite its cheese-like odour, butter tea was less objectionable than some of the comestibles on offer in the jungle of Mouleen. The five of us arrayed ourselves on the floor of Shuwa’s house, and I smiled and thanked her, thus deploying two of my dozen words of Tser-zhag.